But the essayist continues:--'It seems as if it were the season for _vain things_ when _the hurtful oppress us_; in a time when doing ill is common, to do nothing but what _signifies nothing_ is a kind of commendation. 'Tis _my_ comfort that _I_ shall be one of the last that shall be called in question,--for it would be against reason _to punish the less troublesome_ while we are _infested_ with the _greater_. _As the physician_ said to one who presented him his finger to dress, and who, as he perceived, had an ulcer _in his lungs_, "Friend, it is not now time to concern yourself about your finger's ends." _And yet_ I saw some years ago, _a person, whose name and memory I have in very great esteem_, in the very height of our great disorders, when there was _neither law nor justice put in execution, nor magistrate that performed his office_,--_no more than there is now_,--publish I know not what _pitiful reformations_ about _clothes, cookery_ and _law chicanery_. _These are amusements_ wherewith _to feed a people that are ill used, to show that they are not totally forgotten. These others_ do the same, who insist upon _stoutly defending_ the _forms_ of _speaking_, dances and games to a people totally abandoned to all sorts of execrable vices--it is for the Spartans only to fall to combing and curling themselves, when they are just upon the point of running headlong into some extreme danger of their lives. 'For _my part_, I have _yet a worse_ custom. I scorn to mend myself by halves. If my _shoe_ go awry, I let my shirt and my cloak do so too: when I am out of order I feed on mischief. I abandon myself through despair, and let myself go towards the precipice, and as the saying is, throw the helve after the hatchet.' We should not need, perhaps, the aid of the explanations already quoted, to show us that the author does not confess this custom of his for the sake of commending it to the sense or judgment of the reader,--who sees it here for the first time it may be put into words or put on paper, who looks at it here, perhaps, for the first time objectively, from the critical stand-point which the review of another's confession creates; and though it may have been latent in the dim consciousness of his own experience, or practically developed, finds it now for the first time, collected from the phenomena of the blind, instinctive, human motivity, and put down on the page of science, as a principle in nature, in human nature also.